GTK+ Forums

Hello everyone,

I am developing a MUD client and was wondering if there is a special button for grabbing shortcuts. Some applications have a button which awaits for an event upon press.

I believe I could use a button and an entry which shows then the pressed event.

You might be wondering for what that is good. In MUD, you have to input a lot of commands. Sometimes, players want to avoid having to type enter, so they create special events for keys like arrows that upon press do something configurable.

I know I can grab all key presses from a window by connecting the key-press-event signal to a callback. Then, I am able to compare the event with any stored event and execute a corresponding command. But I also have to allow the user to store events and commands.
My question is how to efficiently grab an event and store it.

I hope someone might know what I mean. An example is in the system configuration of shortcuts for desktop environments. Generally, you can input the event and it shows ctrl+1 instead of: <gtk.gdk.Event at 0x1512d28: GDK_KEY_PRESS keyval=Control_1>. Even if I take the keyval of the object, it is an integer.

I thank you in advance,
Raul

GTK is built upon ATK so providing accessibility is a key part of the toolkit and all apps should be designed so that users with limited mobility can use it effectively, e.g. a mouse should not be required. In your case this is good as gtk automatically has the ability to tab between buttons built in and you can add key-bindings to buttons to make this even easier. Unfortunately guidelines for using ATK in GTK is nonexistent in gtk tutorials.
I assume that for whatever key press event you might want that you will also have a button somewhere on the display that will do the same thing. In this case you just add an accelerator to each button. E.g. the following binds control p to a button:

Hello Paul,

thanks for your input. I was actually looking for a way to dynamically add shortcuts to my application whose action is defined by the user too.

This is pretty much what the keyboard part of gnome-control-center does. Looking into their code, I found out that the widget to grab a shortcut is the CellRendererAccel.

Using it, you don't have to tweak much in order to have your shortcut set. You only have to connect "accel-edited" to a callback and set the accel-key and accel-mods properties in the callback.

Using the AccelGroup's connect_group, the assigned callback is called for every registered key events. Parsing the keyval and keymods through the list of registered accelerators, I could perform the action defined by the user along with the accelerator.

I hope that helps someone looking for this same thing.
Best regards,
Raul